Liberating the literature

Category

problems

We are in the process of switching to a new email system and this is causing problems! If you’re requesting things such as password renewal your email is in a queue of 28,776 and the rate of sending is 1,006 per hour! So, another 24+ hours till we’ve got through those.

Prior to the new system we used an in-house email tool we built from scratch. It worked really well for 7+ years but has recently started to creak at the seams. So, we’ve upgraded to a paid system called Mandrill.

The problem is that when you’re new it doesn’t allow rapid sending of emails as it ‘senses’ your reputation. It looks at things such as number of rejected emails (for instance). The one thing we have are a load of dormant accounts and currently we’ve got a bounce rate of 20% – so 20% of emails are bouncing back as being undelivered. This doesn’t help our reputation, which is ‘poor’ – hence being restricted to 1,006 per hour.

The good news is – and Mandrill is great for this – is that it allows us to easily auto-delete these dormant account so next time our reputation will be much higher and therefore we should have a much higher send rate.

That aside Mandrill does all sorts of things which should allow us to create a much better email experience and also it gives us analytics showing how many emails were opened, how many links were clicked etc. Fascinating reading.